Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

> Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?

This also clearly indicates that you didn't read my comment before replying. I was exclusively referring to the claim that Civ games were optimized to be addictive - not that they "were addictive".

You know what other things are addictive, despite having no intentional design put towards that end? Scrolling Hacker News, the New page on Reddit (yes, I know that Reddit has a surfacing algorithm, and it's irrelevant to the New page), many other video games that don't have free-to-play models or any other optimization, reading comics, and many other things.

The fact that something is addictive for some set of the population does not imply that it was designed that way.

> Sid Meier's Civilization is considered one of the most influential computer games in history

An extremely subjective list with hundreds of viable candidates for it. What does "one of" even mean here?

> a critical and commercial success

Which, alongside "one of the most influential computer games in history", are all literally completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is "does it have educational value".

> a pedagogical boon to humanity

Citation needed. I've never heard anyone call Civ anything like this, let alone anyone who is a professional educator.

> The statements you make only reveal your utter ignorance to the subject at hand, as even the most cursory of web searches will squarely establish these facts

Incredible arrogance, the old trope "look it up for yourself", and blatantly false. You know what my very first result is for searching "most inflential video games of all time" on Google is? A list of ten games[1] that doesn't have Civ at all. My next result[2] puts it at position 73. Then another list of five games[3] without it.

The very fact that you consider these subjective opinions, which are literally the opposite of facts to be "facts" proves that you have no idea what you're talking about, nor the most basic understanding of logic. (the fact that you don't know what search engine bubbling is doesn't help either)

> Video games are almost bigger than TV, movies, and radio combined.

Which is, again, completely irrelevant, because (1) you're ranking those by some consumer metric, not educational value, and (2) every one of those are entertainment fields. Which is more important: video games, or the study of physics or history itself? (this is a rhetorical question, and again, regardless of the truth of these claims, they simply do not matter to the discussion)

If you seriously think that video games are at all comparable in educational value to actual education, then you better provide some extremely convincing evidence, because it's pretty clearly false at first glance.

To sum up: aside from the small part of your comment that is objectively false, this entire thing is purely subjective opinion with absolutely no substantiation whatsoever, in addition to being utterly irrelevant to the rest of the thread. Please make points that are actually related to the subject at hand.

[1] https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/greatest-video-games/

[2] https://www.animationcareerreview.com/articles/top-100-most-...

[3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/most-influential-video-...

No, it's not relative. "This game has been optimized for the explicit purpose of "engagement"/addiction"" is a statement that can be factually known to be true or false.

> but come one, it's free-to-play. Of course it's trying to keep people hooked.

That's an appeal to emotion without a logical argument behind it. The logical argument is that the survival of free-to-play games depends on the microtransaction revenue being higher than the cost to run the game. You know what directly contributes to the cost of running the game? People using the servers. Unlike social media platforms that monetize through time spent = ad impressions, free-to-play games do not want to maximize the amount of time spent playing the game, they want to maximize the amount of cosmetics that people buy, which is very different, and is not obviously connected with playtime in any research I'm aware of.

> I also know multiple people who had to cope with Dota addictions ruining their relationships and lives

...which happened to me! But, as someone who is struggling with an HN addicition: something can be addicting without being purposefully designed to be that way - addictive traits do not imply that something was designed to be addictive.

Life is this amazing playground. We can choose our own values and work towards achieving those values, often to great success if we work hard. But, at the end of the day, what's most important is that we enjoy the moments along the way, and that's hard when you have a loud inner critic shouting at you.